All babies will reach a hand across the gulf of empty space that separates them from their mother’s cheek and will touch it and smile. And Momma will smile back, in quiet delight at the simple mystery of love in this world. You don’t need to explain it or unravel it. You can live it.

And spend the rest of your life with a glimmering memory of the simple love-without-question that is a hint of bodhicitta.

Given the right conditions, it will grow. It is what makes men and women marry for life. It’s what makes brothers pull their brothers out of the field of fire or carry strangers from a house in flames.

It’s the feeling that makes you set your feet on the long road to Buddhahood and willingly walk forever or for as long as it takes.  You will have no doubt. It is all there is to do that’s worth doing. And all the distractions of this world don’t get a moment of your heart; the temptations are nothing.

You will know where your life leads and you can read your own Buddhahood written in the stars.  You can hear it in the sound of the trees when the wind blows. In the grim procession of cruelty, madness, rage, and greed that sweeps nations into oblivion and crushes the bones of the petty and powerful into dust; the dust we walk on, that the skies rain on, that the grass grows on, and which, in our time, will rise again as the mountains that will take us on our path to the stars.

We come into this world with the karma we have created in infinite past lifetimes. We can never escape what we have done, but we are entirely free to act now.

It may be that a butterfly has no idea how beautiful it is. It may feel no sadness at all that its lifetime is just a few weeks.  But you should know how beautiful you are. And never forget how fleeting this chance is to do what is noble and good in this world.